Young Fathers: Cocoa Sugar review – sounds like freedom feels

‘The weird warmth of an ice burn’... Young Fathers.
Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

I think about the name of the last Young Fathers album a lot. White Men Are Black Men Too. I’m not sure I know what it means, or if I agree with it, or if either of those things matter. But I like the way it feels – like the sort of thing a freethinking, biracial Scottish rap band should say. Similarly, it’s unclear why this album is called Cocoa Sugar, and its typically fragmentary, allusive lyrics won’t help you. Maybe it doesn’t matter – maybe what’s important is how it makes you feel.

Cocoa Sugar bursts with the weird warmth of an ice burn, a sizzling stew of Tricky-covers-the-Fall garage rap. Each song is nasty, brutish and short, bristling with imagination. Wow shackles its motorik angst to a dead-eyed drawl, seasoned with abattoir squeals. In My View is a slugabed’s vision of anthemic pop, while Toy is the most conventionally vicious rap here, every word a wound. The trio reckon this is their most “linear” album, which seems a stretch. It feels just as estranged of pop’s traditional structures and strictures as they’ve always been. It feels exhilarating; it feels like freedom.